moon

Frank Gratkowski – alto saxophone, bass clarinet
Reinhold Friedl – piano

artwork by Maryna Diatchenko
recorded at Echoraum Vienna, Austria, by Nik Hummer
mixed by Nik Hummer
mastered by Rashad Becker

A Duo-project by pianist and composer Reinhold Friedl and the Greek composer and electronic musician Costis Drygianakis, known as founding member of the legendary experimental music project Optical Musics. Reinhold Friedl and Costis Drygianakis first met in Thessaloniki in 2017 and exchanged recordings since. The pandemic gave Reinhold the opportunity to revisit his record collection and was stoked by the rediscovery of Costis last releases. The plan to work together came up immediately and was realized in summer 2021.

Costis Drygianakis recorded Reinhold Friedl’s special piano sounds on a Blüthner grand piano with a bunch of extremely diverse microphones, ranging from a beautiful old Neumann U67 to a cheap tape cassette machine and even a Dictaphone. The resulting recordings have been classified, selected and processed at his home studio in Kritharia, Greece. No other sounds have been used.

Drygianakis turns Friedl’s piano sounds into a futuristic landscape, keeping always a mediterranean feeling; e-bows on the strings mutate into ship horns, huge piano intensities create foggy sound clouds, prepared notes turn into beautiful bells. The music starts overwhelming, loud, dense, a Ken-Russel-like sound circus. The sound masses transform slowly in a transparent, almost romantic Lied; airy breaks take it further to an even more sensual level: it is not a single piano that you hear, but a huge variety; intimately close-miked sounds, juxtaposed with sonic atmospheres, evoking long forgotten memories, dreamy and chanting… more and more enriched with cheap, wonderfully noisy recordings, transforming the sophisticated instrument into an industrial machine. In this one hour long piece, reminding huge orchestra compositions, the multifaced and radical recording techniques reveal spatial deepness: A sound trip and a love declaration to this Blüthner grand piano in Volos, a survivor from another century. Always fluid, semper mutantes, piano, recording techniques and electronic treatments finally merge in the great final structure and become pure music and turn “two into one”! As the title states: “ta amfótera en” (Ephesians 2.14)

Costis Drygianakis studied physics and social anthropology, while he is an electronic music autodidact. Nevertheless he is internationally renowned as composer and record producer since the legendary project Optical Musics (1984 – 1998). He released experimental electroacoustic music, but also edited important ethnographic recordings. He widely cooperates with Greek and international independent artists and musicians, including among others Nikos Veliotis, Savina Yannatou, Hector Mavrides, Ross Daly, Thanasis Chondros & Alexandra Katsiani, Thanos Kois, Matt Atkins, Matthias Fritsch, Christos Tziztimikas. He also works in the Department for Chanting and Musicology of the Volos Academy for Theological Studies. His music “using unorthodox relationships of composition, recording and re-composition, employs randomness and improvisation, balances in-between ambiance and surprise and explores new grounds without abandoning its sentimental space”.